While childhood vaccination rates are well over 90%, adults are far more likely to be behind on vaccinations http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/national_adult_immunization_plan_final.pdf Think you're up to date on your vaccinations? You might be surprised at how many vaccinations are now recommended for American adults -- and the federal government plans to start tracking which of those vaccines you're behind on. The Department of Health and Human Services released its preliminary draft of a new five year plan to increase adult vaccinations this month. The newly revised 52-page National Adult Immunization Plan says: While the NVP provides a vision for improving protection from vaccine-preventable...

Unfortunately, privacy as we once knew it is dead. “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionally. Even before the age of overcriminalization, when the most upstanding citizen could be counted on to break at least three laws a day without knowing it, most of us have knowingly flouted the law from time to time.Indeed, there was a time when most Americans thought nothing of driving a few...

DENVER — Colorado already is being sued by two neighboring states for legalizing marijuana. Now, the state faces groundbreaking lawsuits from its own residents, who are asking a federal judge to order the new recreational industry to close. The owners of a mountain hotel and a southern Colorado horse farm argue in a pair of lawsuits filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver that the 2012 marijuana-legalization measure has hurt their property and that the marijuana industry is stinky and attracts unsavory visitors.

President Obama talked a surprising amount of common sense on his trip last week to Silicon Valley, where he spoke at a "cybersecurity" gathering at Stanford University. But he undermined some noteworthy remarks about strong encryption--we need it, he said--with the kind of fear-monger hedging that has become almost every politician's refuge from telling the hard truth.... The first was Obama's clear statement that he, personally, favors ubiquitous strong encryption. He thinks everyone should use it but hedges that by saying law enforcement needs a way to break into communications and data.... [W]e need leaders who'll tell the truth--that we...

Sam Andrew, a founding member and guitarist of the San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, died Thursday in San Rafael. He was 73. His death, of complications from open-heart surgery after a heart attack, was confirmed by John Byrne Cooke, a friend and former manager... Big Brother served as the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which was run by band manager Chet Helms before recruiting Joplin and gaining international attention with their explosive performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. “She walked in one day and started singing some songs,” Mr. Andrew said...

A state-level bureaucrat is standing up to the the central government planners is a most unusual way. Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, Diane Douglas, has informed all school districts in the Grand Canyon State that they have blanket authority to ignore all federal nutrition mandates regulating school fundraisers. "Forcing parents and other supporters of schools to only offer federally approved food and snacks at fundraisers is a perfect example of the overreach of government and intrusion into local control," Douglas said in a statement. "I have ordered effective immediately, that the ADE Health and Nutrition Services division grant exemptions for...

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition. Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV Right: 1984

He lied? Yes he lied. Wait a minute. Maybe Brian Williams simply embellished. Guys do that all the time. We all want to be heroes. We enhance the truth particularly as we behaved in war. That’s where Brian Williams met his disgrace. “That’s the way it is,” Walter Cronkite used to say. Well, no. Not quite, these days. There too, in Israel, some are catching on to the deceptions from “news you can trust.” Leading journalist Kalman Liebeskind on Arutz Sheva upbraids (leftist) Big Media for their volley of lies and half-truths especially as they go gunning for Benjamin Netanyahu...

We at Walking In The Desert would like to let our readers know about a documentary that a friend and I are working on. This is our first documentary but we hope that this documentary will be a success and will promote the usage of the Tridentine Mass (Extraordinary Form) A friend and I are in the process to create a documentary that will promote the usage of the Latin Mass. We want to be able to do a video documentary that will interview priests and lay people who attend or celebrate the Latin Mass. We want to ask them...

A critic of mandatory child vaccinations made no apologies for her views in an appearance on Newsmax TV Tuesday, and said that public anger over the Disneyland measles outbreak should be directed at pharmaceutical companies and the federal government, not people like her. "What's happening is people are freaking out about measles outbreaks," Louise Kuo Habakus said ina combative interview with "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner. "They're pointing the finger at unvaccinated children and non-vaccinated families, when really what needs to happen is people need to be pointing the finger at industry and at Congress." Habakus, co-founder of a group called...

Whose Internet is it anyway? Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, says he’s keeping that question in mind as he pitches the biggest regulatory shake-up to the telecommunications industry since 1996, when people still used noisy modems and referred to the “information superhighway” as a fun way to buy books or check the weather. Wheeler has not publicly released his plan yet, and might not for a few weeks. But he has suggested that Internet service has become as critical to people in the United States as water, electricity or phone service and should be regulated like any...

Dear Friends, Obamacare, the VA scandal, the IRS scandal--these are just a few examples of what happens when we give government huge power without oversight. It's about to happen again--the Obama Administration is fighting for a government takeover of the Internet and the Federal Communications Commission is going to vote on it February 26th. That's why I am writing you today--I need your help to stop this.President Obama came out a few weeks ago urging the FCC to vote to regulate the Internet the same way that it regulates public utilities under Title II. What this means is that, for...

The White House dropped a bombshell on Thursday by announcing that FCC already has the authority to take over regulating and taxing the Internet without Congressional approval. Under “network neutrality” proceedings, the FCC could extend its 16.1% fee on interstate telecommunications services and relay fees to the Internet. The action would more than double the “universal service” revenue it collected in 2014, from $8 billion to $16 billion. Although Congress has mandated the general nature of the federal universal service fund and telecommunications relay services, it is the FCC that has the sole authority to set the budget size and...

(Reuters) - The White House on Thursday said legislation was not necessary to settle so-called "net neutrality" rules because the Federal Communications Commission had the authority to write them. Republicans in Congress are trying to drum up support for a bill that would counter the FCC's upcoming new rules. The Obama administration's comments, while not entirely rebuffing the legislative effort, could make some Democrats wary of joining it. "In terms of legislation, we don’t believe it’s necessary given that the FCC has the authorities that it needs under Title II," a White House official told Reuters. "However, we always remain...

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler appears poised to propose new rules that would classify Internet service providers as public utilities in a move designed to ensure everyone has the same access to free content online. […] The remarks suggest that the Federal Communications Commission is falling in line with President Barack Obama, who announced in November that he favors governing Internet service providers like telephone companies to preserve a “free and open” Internet. …

Late last year, Obama asked the Federal Communications Commission to create a new set of rules to make sure everyone has access to the Internet and that phone and cable companies would not be allowed "to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online."

Federal regulators looking to place restrictions on Internet providers will introduce and vote on new proposed net neutrality rules in February, Federal Communications Commission officials said Friday. President Obama's top telecom regulator, Tom Wheeler, told fellow FCC commissioners before the Christmas holiday that he intends to circulate a draft proposal internally next month with an eye toward approving the measure weeks later, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency's deliberations are ongoing. The rules are meant to keep broadband providers such as Verizon and Comcast from speeding up or slowing down some Web sites...

Federal regulators looking to place restrictions on Internet providers will introduce and vote on new proposed net neutrality rules in February, Federal Communications Commission officials said Friday.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will adopt net neutrality rules in early 2015, maybe as soon as February, several observers believe, but few people want to predict what those rules will look like.

AbstractThe FCC has proposed new regulations for Internet service providers, so-called net neutrality rules; the specific practices such rules would ban are unclear. While much will depend on the how the final rules are written, regulation advocates have given some indication of the types of practices they would target. Most of the practices identified by regulation supporters as activities that should be prohibited are in fact beneficial to consumers, or are conducted by challengers to the dominant firms in the marketplace. These cases—identified as examples of neutrality violations by regulation supporters themselves—show that efforts to further regulate the open...

Ready to pay more for Internet access? Me neither. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we can expect under the “net neutrality” rules being pushed by President Obama. “Net neutrality” may sound harmless, but there would be nothing neutral about this change. Currently, broadband providers such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are treated differently than traditional telephone companies and electric utilities. They aren’t subject to “common-carrier” rules that prohibit them from varying rates and services. In short, they can offer -- and charge -- what they want. That’s good for consumers, because it means that in order to compete, they’re always trying...

The fallout from President Barack Obama's push to reclassify internet access as a public utility was immediate, and no one reacted faster the nation's telecom giants. Most issued remarks that characterized the move as a huge mistake, but AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson went one better -- as if on cue, he announced that the company was throwing the brakes on its fiber network rollout because it didn't make sense to sink a ton of money a network infrastructure when no one knew "under what rules those investments will be governed". Long story short, he wants AT&T to wait to build...

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) are squaring off over whether new net neutrality rules would hinder or help the growth of the Internet.After Cruz last week called net neutrality “ObamaCare for the Internet,” Franken over the weekend said that the Texas Republican had the issue “completely wrong.” ADVERTISEMENT The Texas senator “just doesn't understand what this issue is,” Franken said.On Monday, Cruz’s office fired back with YouTube videos and Vine clips that it said explains how tough Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules would “calcify” the Internet and prevent people from using it as a platform for innovation.Cruz...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday took a step toward improving Internet speeds in America, requiring providers to offer download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second to classify as "broadband." The new restrictions also require 3Mbps speeds for uploads to classify as broadband Internet. Internet service providers face the more severe restrictions after the FCC determined that U.S. broadband deployment is not keeping pace with the rest of the world. The new benchmark speeds are a large improvement from the previous requirement of 4Mbps download and 1Mbps upload to classify as broadband. The FCC said that the...

Um...do you mind? Please don't take this the wrong way but you're starting to creep me out. Yeah, I know you are just doing your job but what possible reason could you have to follow me here? Are you checking on how wide my stance is? Whether I will write something nasty on the wall? What? But since you are here, could you at least make yourself useful and find me some toilet paper. This stall is out. Bathrooms are the final realm of privacy. So far as is known, even Winston Smith did not have Big Brother on the...

Are you starting to forget just how creepy government agencies can be when they decide to spy on average (law abiding) citizens? Well, this should help refocus your distrust of big government.Â According to AP News:The Drug Enforcement Administration abandoned an internal proposal to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the United States to investigate gun-trafficking, the agency's chief said Wednesday.Um, goodâ€¦ Also: Â“What the heck?Â”So the DEA was planning on tracking everyone that went to a gun show? Wowâ€¦ Nothing like being innocent until proven guilty, right? It might be time to start borrowing...

Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents. The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration withThe Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATION, are the first from the trove of files provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to show that the Canadian government has launched its own globe-spanning Internet mass surveillance system. According...

Over a year ago we brought you the story of Mr. Filippidis and his family, a Florida Driver who was pulled over by law enforcement in Maryland. The traffic stop would have been typical except for the fact the responding officer demanded, at random, Mr. Filippidis’s firearm. Mr. Filippidis did not have his legally owned -CCW permitted- hand gun, it was home in Florida. Nor did Mr. Filippidis ever say he had a firearm – yet the officer was insistent Mr. Filippidis owned one, handcuffed Mr. Filippidis, and strip searched his vehicle on the side of the road. Numerous Maryland...

The U.S. Department of Justice secretly spies on millions of cars by gathering and storing information about motorists in order to build a national database to track movements, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. The database was originally used by the Drug Enforcement Administration to hunt vehicles involved in drug crimes by tracking license plates, but according to the WSJ, the program expanded to hunt for criminals sought for crimes that were non-drug related. DEA officials have been on record saying they track vehicles near the U.S.-Mexico border to help fight drug cartels, but the new...

The United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA,Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’ The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate...

Doctors’ house calls are considered a thing of the past, but not in the appointment book of Dr. Carrol Frazier Landrum, an 88-year-old physician from Edwards, Mississippi. The good doctor will see you no matter who you are, where you are, or how much money you have — as long his 2007 Toyota Camry can deliver him to your location. But now his state’s medical board wants to see him gone. Dr. Landrum, a WWII veteran, was forced to make a change after crime drove him from his Edwards, Mississippi, office two years ago, and he couldn’t find another space...

If you have a recently issued credit or debit card, there is a very good chance it has an RFID chip in it that will transmit your card information to any nearby reader. Many of the newer model smartphones are RFID enabled and make it possible for someone standing next to you in line at the grocery store or at the train station to steal your identity and your money. Just wanted to raise awareness of this risk and create an opportunity to share ideas on how to mitigate this risk. I disabled the chip in my cards with a...

On Monday, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson revealed details of a $35 million lawsuit against the Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service for the alleged hacking of her computers. This led to a new round of snark from Politico’s Dylan Byers, who suggested on Twitter Attkisson was taking the wrong approach: #Realtalk: If you believe U.S. gov hacked your computers this isn’t the way you go about doing it… if you want publicity, on the other hand— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) January 5, 2015 This raises an obvious question. What is the right approach under the circumstances? Sharyl Attkisson pointed...

Did the Obama administration put a journalist under surveillance for reporting critically on its activities? Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says yes — and she wants $35 million in damages from the Department of Justice for it. Attkisson filed a series of legal motions today that claim the DoJ hacked into her computer and attacked her professionally: In a series of legal filings that seek $35 million in damages, Attkisson alleges that three separate computer forensic exams showed that hackers used sophisticated methods to surreptitiously monitor her work between 2011 and 2013. … In the lawsuit and related claims against...

New Year’s Day will usher in hundreds of new laws in California, including a landmark law that allows undocumented individuals to receive a driver’s license. In all, California will add 930 new laws, most of which will go into effect Thursday. Some of the most talked-about laws won’t take effect until July, such as a statewide ban on plastic bags, required sick leave for employees and a requirement that new smartphones come with antitheft technology.

One of the U.S. Army’s giant surveillance blimps will rise to 10,000 feet above Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland on Friday for a three-year test. A second aircraft will begin testing in January. The Army’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), which is built by Raytheon, will be tested for its ability to identify incoming enemy aircraft. “This will enable senior defense officials to support a determination whether to transition JLENS capabilities to an enduring mission at the conclusion of the three-year operational exercise,” the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement on...

Facebook is working on software that could prevent users posting unflattering photos of themselves. Combining image recognition and artificial intelligence, the system would be able to distinguish between drunk and sober pictures. It would ask: "Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?" The plan was revealed by the head of Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab. Speaking to Wired magazine, Yann LeCun said he wanted to build a Facebook digital assistant. In the future, this assistant might also be able to help identify when someone else has uploaded a picture of a user without permission,...

The Internal Revenue Service, which claims to be so understaffed that it can’t bother to collect unpaid taxes, or search backup tapes for Lois Lerner’s “missing” emails, apparently has plenty of time to read the comment threads on conservative blogs that have been critical of the agency (Hi there, IRS agents!). William Jacobson, one of the best-informed and most effective critics of the agency, writes on Legal Insurrection: Hey, remember the Reader Poll we did about whether it was okay to follow and try to interview Lois Lerner in her neighborhood? Do you approve of media confronting Lois Lerner in...

More and more, governments are using powerful spying software to target human rights activists and journalists, often the forgotten victims of cyberwar. Now, these victims have a new tool to protect themselves. Called Detekt, it scans a person's computer for traces of surveillance software, or spyware. A coalition of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched Detekt on Wednesday, with the goal of equipping activists and journalists with a free tool to discover if they've been hacked. "Our ultimate aim is for human rights defenders, journalists and civil society groups to be able to carry...

London's police chief today warns society against letting parts of the internet become a “dark and ungoverned” space populated by paedophiles, murderers and terrorists. In a call for action, Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe says encryption on computers and mobile phones is frustrating police investigations, meaning parts of the web are becoming “anarchic places”. He was telling a New York law enforcement conference: “We can’t allow parts of the internet, or any communications platform, to become dark, ungoverned space where images of child abuse are exchanged, murders are planned and terrorist plots are progressed. “In a democracy we cannot accept...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

Federal officials are challenging new benefit rules at Honeywell Inc. that create monetary penalties unless employees and spouses take medical tests. A lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in response to complaints from two Minnesota employees sets up a potential court case over how far employers can go to shift health costs and influence worker behavior. The agency said in the suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, that new health screening and penalties at Honeywell violate the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. “Employees will be penalized if they or their...

Clearly the UK is still a moderate Muslim country. He wasn’t beheaded, was he? (Note: this joke may be illegal in the United Kingdom. If you read it and chuckled, report immediately to the nearest police department that is busy ignoring Muslim sexual abuse of girls.) .... In a free country, eyes would have rolled and the queue would have marched on. But in the West offending Muslims is more vigorously prosecuted than actual Muslim terror. ... The court knew that they didn’t have enough material to work with so they played a waiting game and blinked. This time Big...

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

"You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out." This has become a recurring theme in Musk's public comments, and each time he warns of the AI bogeyman it seems even more dire. In June, Musk raised the specter of the "Terminator" franchise, saying that he invests in companies working on artificial intelligence just to be able to keep an eye on the technology. In August, he reiterated his concerns in a tweet, writing that AI is...

Students at a Mapleton Junior High School in Utah County were asked to take inventory of the things inside their family medicine cabinet and then turn that list into their health teacher. A parent, Onika Nugent, was not pleased with the assignment, so she posted the assignment on Facebook and sent a note to the teacher and the principal. She shared a portion of the letter she sent school officials: “I said, ‘Although it may be a good idea for parents to do an inventory of their medicine cabinet, I believe it is inappropriate for students to counsel their parents,...

Tech companies like Apple and Google want to make the data customers carry on their smartphones and computers more secure, safe from the prying eyes of spies and identity thieves alike. But law-enforcement officials--from the FBI to local police--see those same devices as treasure troves of evidence.... "I'd be surprised if more than a handful of members would support the idea of backdooring Americans' personal property," Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and vocal privacy advocate, said.... And a House Democratic aide said that staffers have been in touch with the FBI on the issue but that Congress is unlikely...

FBI Director James Comey gave a strong speech today (Oct. 16) explaining why law enforcement should have access to data on encrypted smartphones. But he failed to cite any examples in which such law-enforcement access could have made the difference between life and death.... The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994 mandates that telecommunications companies must give police the ability to listen in on telephone conversations. CALEA covers landlines and cellular carriers, and was expanded in 2004 to cover Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers and broadband Internet service providers. For the past few years, the FBI...